Bennett Arnold
These Twain
Suddenly Hilda turned round upon her husband.
"I shall take George to London to-morrow about his eyes," she said, with immense purpose and sincerity, in a kind of fierce challenge.
This was her amends to George for having often disbelieved him, and for having suspected him of taking after his father. She made her amends passionately, and with all the force of her temperament. In her eyes George was now a martyr.
"To London?" exclaimed Edwin weakly.
"Yes. It's no use half doing these things. I shall ask Charlie Orgreave to recommend me a first-class oculist."
Edwin dared say nothing. Either Manchester or Birmingham would have been just as good as London, perhaps better. Moreover, she had not even consulted him. She had decided by a violent impulse and announced her decision. This was not right; she would have protested against a similar act by Edwin. But he could not argue with her. She was far beyond argument.
"I wouldn't have that boy's eyesight played with for anything!" she said fiercely.
"Well, of course you wouldn't! Who would?" Edwin thought, but he did not say it.
"Go and see what he's doing," she said.
Edwin slouched off. He was no longer the master of the house. He was only an economic factor and general tool in the house. And as he wandered like a culprit up the stairs of the mysteriously transformed dwelling he thought again: "What is it that binds me to her?" But he was abashed and in spite of himself impressed by the intensity of Hilda's formidable emotion. Nevertheless as he began vaguely to perceive all that was involved in her threat to go to London on the morrow, he stiffened, and said to himself: "We shall see about that. We shall just see about that!"
V
They were at the meal. Hilda had covered George's portion of fish with a plate and put it before the fire to keep warm. She was just returning to the table. Tertius Ingpen, who sat with his back to the fire, looked at her over his shoulder with an admiring smile and said:
"Well, I've had some good meals in this house, but this is certainly the best bit of fish I ever tasted. So that the catastrophe in the kitchen leaves me unmoved."
Hilda, with face suddenly transformed by a responsive smile, insinuated herself between the table and her arm-chair, drew forward the chair by its arms, and sat down. Her keen pleasure in the compliment was obvious. Edwin noted that the meal was really very well served, the table brighter than usual, the toast crisper, and the fish-a fine piece of hake white as snow within its browned exterior-merely perfect. There was no doubt that Hilda could be extremely efficient when she desired; Edwin's criticism was that she was too often negligent, and that in her moods of conscientiousness she gave herself too urgently and completely, producing an unnecessary disturbance in the atmosphere of the home. Nevertheless Edwin too felt pleasure in the compliment to Hilda; and he calmly enjoyed the spectacle of his wife and his friend side by side on such mutually appreciative terms. The intimacy of the illuminated table in the midst of the darker room, the warmth and crackling of the fire, the grave solidity of the furniture, the springiness of the thick carpet, and the delicate odours of the repast, – all these things satisfied in him something that was profound. And the two mature, vivacious, intelligent faces under the shaded gas excited his loyal affection.
"That's right," Hilda murmured, in her clear enunciation. "I do like praise!"
"Now then, you callous brute," said Ingpen to Edwin. "What do you say?"
And Hilda cried with swift, complaining sincerity:
"Oh! Edwin never praises me!"
Her sincerity convinced by its very artlessness. The complaint had come unsought from her heart. And it was so spontaneous and forcible that Tertius Ingpen, as a tactful guest, saw the advisability of easing the situation by laughter.
"Yes, I do!" Edwin protested, and though he was shocked, he laughed, in obedience to Ingpen's cue. It was true; he did praise her; but not frequently, and almost always in order to flatter her rather than to express his own emotion. Edwin did not care for praising people; he would enthusiastically praise a book, but not a human being. His way was to take efficiency for granted. "Not so bad," was a superlative of laudation with him. He was now shocked as much by the girl's outrageous candour as by the indisputable revelation that she went hungry for praise. Even to a close friend such as Ingpen, surely a wife had not the right to be quite so desperately sincere. Edwin considered that in the presence of a third person husband and wife should always at any cost maintain the convention of perfect conjugal amenity. He knew couples who achieved the feat, – Albert and Clara, for example. But Hilda, he surmised, had other ideas, if indeed she had ever consciously reflected upon this branch of social demeanour. Certainly she seemed at moments to lose all regard for appearances.
Moreover, she was polluting by acerbity the pure friendliness of the atmosphere, and endangering cheer.
"He's too wrapped up in the works to think about praising his wife," Hilda continued, still in the disconcerting vein of sincerity, but with less violence and a more philosophical air. The fact was that, although she had not regained the zest of the mood so rudely dissipated by the scene with Ada, she was kept cheerful by the mere successful exercise of her own energy in proving to these two men that servants were not in the least essential to the continuance of plenary comfort in her house; and she somewhat condescended towards Edwin.
"By the way, Teddie," said Ingpen, pulling lightly at his short beard, "I heard a rumour that you were going to stand for the Town Council in the South ward. Why didn't you?"
Edwin looked a little confused.
"Who told you that tale?"
"It was about."
"It never came from me," said Edwin.
Hilda broke in eagerly:
"He was invited to stand. But he wouldn't. I thought he ought to. I begged him to. But no, he wouldn't. And did you know he refused a J.P.ship too?"
"Oh!" mumbled Edwin. "That sort o' thing's not my line."
"Oh, isn't it!" Ingpen exclaimed. "Then whose line is it?"
"Look at all the rotters in the Council!" said Edwin.
"All the more reason why you should be on it!"
"Well, I've got no time," Edwin finished gloomily and uneasily.
Ingpen paused, tapping his teeth with his finger, before proceeding, in a judicial, thoughtful manner which in recent years he had been developing:
"I'll tell you what's the matter with you, old man. You don't know it, but you're in a groove. You go about like a shuttle from the house to the works and the works to the house. And you never think beyond the works and the house."
"Oh, don't I?"
Ingpen went placidly on:
"No, you don't. You've become a good specimen of the genus 'domesticated business man.' You've forgotten what life is. You fancy you're at full stretch all the time, but you're in a coma. I suppose you'll never see forty again-and have you ever been outside this island? You went to Llandudno this year because you went last year. And you'll go next year because you went this year. If you happen now and then to worry about the failure of your confounded Liberal Party you think you're a blooming broad-minded publicist. Where are your musical evenings? When I asked you to go with me to a concert at Manchester last week but one, you thought I'd gone dotty, simply because it meant your leaving the works early and not getting to bed until the unheard-of-time of one thirty a.m."
"I was never told anything about any concert," Hilda interjected sharply.
"Go on! Go on!" said Edwin raising his eyebrows.
"I will," said Ingpen with tranquillity, as though discussing impartially and impersonally the conduct of some individual at the Antipodes. "Where am I? Well, you're always buying books, and I believe you reckon yourself a bit of a reader. What d'you get out of them? I daresay you've got decided views on the transcendent question whether Emily Brontë was a greater writer than Charlotte. That's about what you've got. Why, dash it, you haven't a vice left. A vice would interfere with your lovely litho. There's only one thing that would upset you more than a machinery breakdown at the works-"
"And what's that?"
"What's that? If one of the hinges of your garden-gate came off, or you lost your latchkey! Why, just look how you've evidently been struck all of a heap by this servant affair! I expect it occurred to you your breakfast might be five minutes late in the morning."
"Stuff!" said Edwin, amiably. He regarded Ingpen's observations as fantastically unjust and beside the mark. But his sense of fairness and his admiration of the man's intellectual honesty would not allow him to resent them. Ingpen would discuss and dissect either his friends or himself with equal detachment; the detachment was complete. And his assumption that his friends fully shared his own dispassionate, curious interest in arriving at the truth appealed very strongly to Edwin's loyalty. That Ingpen was liable to preach and even to hector was a drawback which he silently accepted.
"Struck all of a heap indeed!" muttered Edwin.
"Wasn't he, Hilda?"
"I should just say he was! And I know he thinks it's all my fault," said Hilda.
Tertius Ingpen glanced at her an instant, and gave a short half-cynical laugh, which scarcely concealed his mild scorn of her feminine confusion of the argument.
"It's the usual thing!" said Ingpen, with scorn still more marked. At this stage of a dissertation he was inclined to be less a human being than the trumpet of a sacred message. "It's the usual thing! I never knew a happy marriage yet that didn't end in the same way." Then, perceiving that he was growing too earnest, and that his emphasis on the phrase 'happy marriage' had possibly been too sarcastic, he sniggered.
"I really don't see what marriage has to do with it," said Hilda, frowning.
"No, of course you don't," Ingpen agreed.
"If you'd said business-" she added.
"Now we've had the diagnosis," Edwin sardonically remarked, looking at his plate, "what's the prescription?" He was reflecting: "'Happy marriage,' does he call it! … Why on earth does she say I think it's all her fault? I've not breathed a word."
"Well," replied Ingpen. "You live much too close to your infernal works. Why don't you get away, right away, and live out in the country like a sensible man, instead of sticking in this filthy hole-among all these new cottages? … Barbarian hordes…"
"Oh! Hurrah!" cried Hilda. "At last I've got somebody who takes my side."
"Of course you say it's impossible. You naturally would-" Ingpen resumed.
He was interrupted by the entrance of George. Soon after Tertius Ingpen's arrival, George had been despatched to summon urgently Mrs. Tams, the charwoman who had already more than once helped to fill a hiatus between two cooks. George showed now no trace of his late martyrdom, nor of a headache. To conquer George in these latter days you had to demand of him a service. It was Edwin who had first discovered the intensity of the boy's desire to take a useful share in any adult operation whatever. He came in red-cheeked, red-handed, rough, defiant, shy, proud, and making a low intermittent "Oo-oo" noise with protruding lips to indicate the sharpness of the frost outside. As he had already greeted Ingpen he was able to go without ceremony straight to his chair.
Confidentially, in the silence, Hilda raised her eyebrows to him interrogatively. In reply he gave one short nod. Thus in two scarcely perceptible gestures the assurance was asked for and given that the mission had been successful and that Mrs. Tams would be coming up at once. George loved these private and laconic signallings, which produced in him the illusion that he was getting nearer to the enigma of life.
As he persisted in the "Oo-oo" manifestation, Hilda amicably murmured:
"Hsh-hsh!"
George pressed his lips swiftly and hermetically together, and raised his eyebrows in protest against his own indecorum. He glanced at his empty place; whereupon Hilda glanced informingly in the direction of the fire, and George, skilled in the interpretation of minute signs, skirted stealthily round the table behind his mother's chair, and snatched his loaded plate from the hearth.
Nobody said a word. The sudden stoppage of the conversation had indeed caused a slight awkwardness among the elders. George, for his part, was quite convinced that they had been discussing his eyesight.
"Furnace all right again, sonny?" asked Edwin, quietly, when the boy had sat down. Hilda was replenishing Ingpen's plate.
"Blop!" muttered George, springing up aghast. This meant that he had forgotten the furnace in the cellar, source of heat to the radiator in the hall. By a recent arrangement he received sixpence a week for stoking the furnace.
"Never mind! It'll do afterwards," said Edwin.
But George, masticating fish, shook his head. He must be stern with himself, possibly to atone for his tears. And he went off instantly to the cellar.
"Bit chill," observed Edwin to him as he left the room. "A bit chilly" was what he meant; but George delighted to chip the end off a word, and when Edwin chose to adopt the same practice, the boy took it as a masonic sign of profound understanding between them.
George nodded and vanished. And both Edwin and Hilda dwelt in secret upon his boyish charm, and affectionate satisfaction mingled with and softened their apprehensions and their brooding responsibility and remorse. They thought: "He is simply exquisite," and in their hearts apologised to him.
Tertius Ingpen asked suddenly:
"What's happened to the young man's spectacles?"
"They don't suit him," said Hilda eagerly. "They don't suit him at all. They give him headaches. Edwin would have me take him to the local man, what's-his-name at Hanbridge. I was afraid it would be risky, but Edwin would have it. I'm going to take him to London to-morrow. He's been having headaches for some time and never said a word. I only found it out by accident."
"Surely," Ingpen smiled, "it's contrary to George's usual practice to hide his troubles like that, isn't it?"
"Oh!" said Hilda. "He's rather secretive, you know."
"I've never noticed," said Ingpen, "that he was more secretive than most of us are about a grievance."
Edwin, secretly agitated, said in a curious light tone:
"If you ask me, he kept it quiet just to pay us out."
"Pay you out? What for?"
"For making him wear spectacles at all. These kids want a deuce of a lot of understanding; but that's my contribution. He simply said to himself: 'Well, if they think they're going to cure my eyesight for me with their beastly specs they just aren't, and I won't tell 'em!'"
"Edwin!" Hilda protested warmly. "I wonder you can talk like that!"
Tertius Ingpen went off into one of his peculiar long fits of laughter; and Edwin quizzically smiled, feeling as if he was repaying Hilda for her unnecessary insistence upon the fact that he was responsible for the choosing of an optician. Hilda, suspecting that the two men saw something droll which was hidden from her, blushed and then laughed in turn, somewhat self-consciously.
"Don't you think it's best to go to London, about an affair like eyesight?" she asked Ingpen pointedly.
"The chief thing in these cases," said Ingpen solemnly, "is to satisfy the maternal instinct. Yes, I should certainly go to London. If Teddie disagrees, I'm against him. Who are you going to?"
"You are horrid!" Hilda exclaimed, and added with positiveness: "I shall ask Charlie Orgreave first. He'll tell me the best man."
"You seem to have a great belief in Charlie," said Ingpen.
"I have," said Hilda, who had seen Charlie at George's bedside when nobody knew whether George would live or die.
And while they were talking about Charlie and about Janet, who was now living with her brother at Ealing, the sounds of George stoking the furnace below came dully up through the floor-boards.
"If you and George are going away," asked Ingpen, "what'll happen to his worship-with not a servant in the house?"
This important point had been occupying Edwin's mind ever since Hilda had first announced her intention to go to London. But he had not mentioned it to her, nor she to him, their relations being rather delicate. It had, for him, only an academic interest, since he had determined that she should not go to London on the morrow. Nevertheless he awaited anxiously the reply.
Hilda answered with composure:
"I'm hoping he'll come with us."
He had been prepared for anything but this. The proposition was monstrously impossible. Could a man leave his works at a moment's notice? The notion was utterly absurd.
"That's quite out of the question," he said at once. He was absolutely sincere. The effect of Ingpen's discourse was, however, such as to upset the assured dignity of his pronouncement; for the decision was simply an illustration of Ingpen's theory concerning him. He blushed.
"Why is it out of the question?" demanded Hilda, inimically gazing at him.
She had lost her lenient attitude towards him of the afternoon. Nevertheless, reflecting upon Tertius Ingpen's indictment of the usual happy marriage, she had been planning the expedition to London as a revival of romance in their lives. She saw it as a marvellous rejuvenating experience. When she thought of all that she had suffered, and all that Edwin had suffered, in order that they might come together, she was quite desolated by the prosaic flatness of the ultimate result. Was it to attain their present stolid existence that they had endured affliction for a decade? She wanted passionately to break the mysterious bands that held them both back from ecstasy and romance. And he would not help her. He would not enter into her desire. She had known that he would refuse. He refused everything-he was so set in his own way. Resentment radiated from her.
"I can't," said Edwin. "What d'you want to go to-morrow for? What does a day or two matter?"
Then she loosed her tongue. Why to-morrow? Because you couldn't trifle with a child's eyesight. Already the thing had been dragging on for goodness knew how long. Every day might be of importance. And why not to-morrow? They could shut the house up, and go off together and stay at Charlie's. Hadn't Janet asked them many a time? Maggie would look out for new servants. And Mrs. Tams would clean the house. It was really the best way out of the servant question too, besides being the best for George.
"And there's another thing," she went on without a pause, speaking rapidly and clearly. "Your eyes want seeing to as well. Do you think I don't know?" she sneered.
"Mine!" he exclaimed. "My eyes are as right as rain." It was not true. His eyes had been troubling him.
"Then why have you had a double candle-bracket fixed at your bed-head, when a single one's been enough for you all these years?" she demanded.
"I just thought of it, that's all," said Edwin glumly, and with no attempt to be diplomatic. "Anyhow I can't go to London to-morrow. And when I want an oculist," he finished with grimness, "Hanbridge'll be good enough for me, I'm thinking."
Strange, she had never before said a word to him about his eyes!
"Then what shall you do while I'm away?" she asked implacably.
But if she was implacable, he also could be implacable. If she insisted on leaving him in the lurch, – well, she should leave him in the lurch! Tertius Ingpen was witness of a plain breach between them. It was unfortunate; it was wholly Hilda's fault; but he had to face the fact.
"I don't know," he replied curtly.
The next moment George returned.
"Hasn't Mrs. Tams been quick, mother?" said George. "She's come."
VI
In the drawing-room, after the meal, Edwin could hear through the half open door the sounds of conversation between Hilda and Mrs. Tams, with an occasional word from George, who was going to help Mrs. Tams to "put the things away" after she had washed and wiped. The voice of Mrs. Tams was very gentle and comforting. Edwin's indignant pity went out to her. Why should Mrs. Tams thus cheerfully bear the misfortunes of others? Why should she at a moment's notice leave a cottageful of young children and a husband liable at any time to get drunk and maim either them or her, in order to meet a crisis caused by Hilda's impulsiveness and lack of tact? The answer, as in so many cases, was of course economic. Mrs. Tams could not afford not to be at Mrs. Clayhanger's instant call; also she was born the victim of her own altruism; her soul was soft like her plump cushionlike body, and she lived as naturally in injustice as a fish in water. But could anything excuse those who took advantage of such an economic system and such a devoted nature? Edwin's conscience uneasily stirred; he could have blushed. However, he was helpless; and he was basely glad that he was helpless, that it was no affair of his after all, and that Mrs. Tams had thus to work out her destiny to his own benefit. He saw in her a seraph for the next world, and yet in this world he contentedly felt himself her superior. And her voice, soothing, acquiescent, expressive of the spirit which gathers in extraneous woes as the mediæval saint drew to his breast the swords of the executioners, continued to murmur in the hall.
Edwin thought:
"I alone in this house feel the real significance of Mrs. Tams. I'm sure she doesn't feel it herself."
But these reflections were only the vague unimportant background to the great matter in his mind, – the difficulty with Hilda. When he had entered the house, questions of gaslight and blinds were enormous to him. The immense general question of servants had diminished them to a trifle. Then the question of George's headache and eyesight had taken precedence. And now the relations of husband and wife were mightily paramount over everything else. Tertius Ingpen, having as usual opened the piano, was idly diverting himself with strange chords, while cigarette smoke rose into his eyes, making him blink. Like Edwin, Ingpen was a little self-conscious after the open trouble in the dining-room. It would have been absurd to pretend that trouble did not exist; on the other hand the trouble was not of the kind that could be referred to, by even a very intimate friend. The acknowledgment of it had to be mute. But in addition to being self-conscious, Ingpen was also triumphant. There was a peculiar sardonic and somewhat disdainful look on his face as he mused over the chords, trying to keep the cigarette smoke out of his eyes. His oblique glance seemed to be saying to Edwin: "What have I always told you about women? Well, you've married and you must take the consequences. Your wife's no worse than other wives. Here am I, free! And wouldn't you like to be in my place, my boy! … How wise I have been!"
Edwin resented these unspoken observations. The contrast between Ingpen's specious support and flattery of Hilda when she was present, and his sardonic glance when she was absent, was altogether too marked. Himself in revolt against the institution of marriage, Edwin could not bear that Ingpen should attack it. Edwin had, so far as concerned the outside world, taken the institution of marriage under his protection. Moreover Ingpen's glance was a criticism of Hilda such as no husband ought to permit. And it was also a criticism of the husband-that slave and dupe! … Yet, at bottom what Edwin resented was Ingpen's contemptuous pity for the slave and the dupe.
"Why London-and why to-morrow?" said Edwin, cheerfully, with a superior philosophical air, as though impartially studying an argumentative position, as though he could regard the temporary vagaries of an otherwise fine sensible woman with bland detachment. He said it because he was obliged to say something, in order to prove that he was neither a slave nor a dupe.
"Ask me another," replied Ingpen curtly, continuing to produce chords.
"Well, we shall see," said Edwin mysteriously, firmly, and loftily; meaning that, if his opinion were invited, his opinion would be that Hilda would not go away to-morrow and that whenever she went she would not go to London.
He had decided to have a grand altercation with his wife that night, when Ingpen and Mrs. Tams had departed and George was asleep and they had the house to themselves. He knew his ground and he could force a decisive battle. He felt no doubt as to the result. The news of his triumph should reach Ingpen.
Ingpen was apparently about to take up the conversation when George came clumsily and noisily into the drawing-room. All his charm seemed to have left him.
"I thought you were going to help," said Edwin.
"So I am," George challenged him; and, lacking the courage to stop at that point, added: "But they aren't ready yet."
"Let's try those Haydn bits, George," Ingpen suggested.
"Oh no!" said George curtly.
Ingpen and the boy had begun to play easy fragments of duets together.
Edwin said with sternness:
"Sit down to that piano and do as Mr. Ingpen asks you."
George flushed and looked foolish and sat down; and Ingpen quizzed him. All three knew well that Edwin's fierceness was only one among sundry consequences of the mood of the housemistress. The slow movement and the scherzo from the symphony were played. And while the music went on, Edwin heard distantly the opening and shutting of the front-door and an arrival in the hall, and then chattering. Maggie had called. "What's she after?" thought Edwin.
"Hoo! There's Auntie Maggie!" George exclaimed, as soon as the scherzo was finished, and ran off.
"That boy is really musical," said Ingpen with conviction.
"Yes, I suppose he is," Edwin agreed casually, as though deprecating a talent which however was undeniable. "But you'd never guess he's got a bad headache, would you?"
It was a strange kind of social evening, and Hilda-it seemed to the august Edwin-had a strange notion of the duties of hostess. Surely, if Mrs. Tams was in the kitchen, Hilda ought to be in the drawing-room with their guest! Surely Maggie ought to have been brought into the drawing-room, – she was not a school girl, she was a woman of over forty, and yet she had quite inexcusably kept her ancient awkwardness and timidities. He could hear chatterings from the dining-room, scurryings through the hall, and chatterings from the kitchen; then a smash of crockery, a slight scream, and girlish gigglings. They were all the same, all the women he knew, except perhaps Clara, – they had hours when they seemed to forget that they were adult and that their skirts were long. And how was it that Hilda and Maggie were suddenly so intimate, they whose discreet mutual jealousy was an undeniable phenomenon of the family life? With all his majesty he was simpleton enough never to have understood that two women who eternally suspect each other may yet dissolve upon occasion into the most touching playful tenderness. The whole ground-floor was full of the rumour of an apparent alliance between Hilda and Maggie. And as he listened Edwin glanced sternly at the columns of the evening Signal, while Tertius Ingpen, absorbed, worked his way bravely through a sonata of Beethoven.
Then George reappeared.
"Mother's going to take me to London to-morrow about my eyes," said George to Ingpen, stopping the sonata by his mere sense of the terrific importance of such tidings. And he proceeded to describe the projected doings in London, the visit to Charlie and Janet Orgreave, and possibly to the Egyptian Hall.
Edwin did not move. He kept an admirable and complete calm under the blow. Hilda was decided, then, to defy him. In telling the boy, who during the meal had been permitted to learn nothing, she had burnt her boats; she had even burnt Edwin's boats also: which seemed to be contrary to the rules laid down by society for conjugal warfare, – but women never could fight according to rules! The difficulties and dangers of the great pitched battle which Edwin had planned for the close of the evening were swiftly multiplied. He had misgivings.
The chattering, giggling girls entered the drawing-room. But as Maggie came through the doorway her face stiffened; her eyes took on a glaze; and when Ingpen bent over her hand in all the false ardour of his excessive conventional chivalry, the spinster's terrible constraint-scourge of all her social existence-gripped her like a disease. She could scarcely speak.
"Hello, Mag," Edwin greeted her.
Impossible to divine in this plump, dowdy, fading, dumb creature the participator in all those chatterings and gigglings of a few moments earlier! Nevertheless Edwin, who knew her profoundly, could see beneath the glaze of those eyes the commonsense soul of the sagacious woman protesting against Ingpen's affected manners and deciding that she did not care for Ingpen at all.
"Auntie Hamps is being naughty again," said Hilda bluntly.
Ingpen, and then Edwin, sniggered.
"I can't do anything with her, Edwin," said Maggie, speaking quickly and eagerly, as she and Hilda sat down. "She's bound to let herself in for another attack if she doesn't take care of herself. And she won't take care of herself. She won't listen to the doctor or anybody else. She's always on her feet, and she's got sewing-meetings on the brain just now. I've got her to bed early to-night-she's frightfully shaky-and I thought I'd come up and tell you. You're the only one that can do anything with her at all, and you really must come and see her to-morrow on your way to the works."
Maggie spoke as though she had been urging Edwin for months to take the urgent matter in hand and was now arrived at desperation.
"All right! All right!" said he, with amiable impatience; it was the first he had heard of the matter. "I'll drop in. But I've got no influence over her," he added, with sincerity.
"Oh yes, you have!" said Maggie, mildly now. "I'm very sorry to hear about George's eyes. Seeing it's absolutely necessary for Hilda to take him to London to-morrow, and you've got no servants at all, can't you come and sleep at Auntie's for a night or two? You've no idea what a relief it would be to me."